About the NAMAC Bloggers

NAMAC Bloggers offer their expertise in the following subject areas: Media and Cultural Policy, Capacity-Building, Creative Production, Distribution, Exhibition/Programming, Community Media and Arts, Youth Media and Public Media.

Meet Our Bloggers

Linda Blackaby directs CinemaProjects, consulting with festivals and exhibitors on programming and community engagement. CinemaProjects also advises filmmakers, funders and other organizations. Her considerable media arts experience starting in the college film society, eventually lead her to found and direct a Philadelphia media arts center presenting year-round exhibitions, services to the independent film community, and the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. She served on the ITVS founding board, and was director of programming at the San Francisco Film Society (2001-2009). Currently she consults with the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the Washington, DC International Film Festival and Lunafest, among others.

Vicki Callahan is an Associate Professor of Art and Design in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is also a visiting scholar at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where her classes have a special focus on remix and social media.  She is also the author of Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Wayne State UP, 2004) and the editor for the recent collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Wayne State UP 2010). She is the author/organizer of the Feminism 3.0 website and with Lina Srivastava she co-authors the site Transmedia Activism. Her interests in silent cinema, feminist theory, and digital media intersect around questions of emergent/disruptive technologies, new modes of writing, social justice, and alternative or counter narrative forms.

Candace Clement is an Outreach Manager for Free Press, a national organization working to reform the media. Her work has primarily focused on public and community media, and she is co-author of the 2010 report New Public Media: A Plan for Action. Prior to joining Free Press she worked extensively in college and community radio. Candace spends her "free" time playing guitar, singing, and DIYing with her awk-pop-indierock band. She recently completed a week of band coaching and guitar instructing at the new Girls Rock Camp Boston. 

Brian Hearn was born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He earned a B.S. degree in Writing for Television/Radio/Film from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. After several years of studying and working in Madrid, London, Puerto Rico and Portland, Oregon Brian returned to Oklahoma City to become the Film Curator at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, a position he has held since 1995. Since then the Film Program has grown to exhibit more than 300 screenings annually. Brian has also developed curricula and taught film courses at the University of Oklahoma, University of Central Oklahoma and the Museum School. In 2006 the Oklahoma City Museum of Art Film Program became one of the founding members of the Sundance Institute Art House Project, a network of mission driven, community based cinemas. In 2009 The Oklahoma Film Critics Circle awarded Brian with The Tilghman Award, given annually, for outstanding support of independent, foreign and art films in Oklahoma and for raising film consciousness in the state. He is currently a programmer/board member for the deadCENTER Film Festival and a 2010 Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellow.

Sean McLaughlin is a digital ecologist, serving as Executive Director
of Access Humboldt, a Knight Media Policy Fellow with New America Foundation and as a former ZFellow with ZeroDivide. Known for living in proximity with spectacular natural environments, he has an affinity for diverse multi-cultural engagement, a reputation for fearless innovation and a dry eclectic sense of humor.

Sam Kaplan is an AmeriCorps member working to coordinate and develop digital media training programs for Access Humboldt through the
Digital Arts Service Corps. His other interests include basketball,
walking around outside, and iPhone photography. His dream is to open a
combination laundromat/thrift store/community media center someday,
and he hopes to see you at the 2011 Allied Media Conference!
 

Traci L. Morris, a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, has a PhD in American Indian Studies and is the owner of Homahota Consulting. Her background includes National and State level policy analysis; specializing in telecom and communications policy. Morris has worked with tribal communities in Arizona and was part of the Napolitano Administration in the Arizona Governor’s Office at the Arizona Commission of Indian Affairs. Additionally, she has done community outreach, resource development, planning, training and technical assistance, coalition building, grant writing, grant management, database management, analysis and interpretation of data, and report writing.

The Open Technology Initiative Bloggers

Independent media artists thrive in an environment of collaboration — an environment best supported by integrating useful technological innovations. Unfortunately, national policies have not caught up with current and upcoming technologies, leading to outcomes that harm innovation, the arts, media production, and information dissemination. The Open Technology Initiative will explore the increasingly important intersection of media, technology, and policy and provide readers with thought-provoking analysis of how inside-the-Beltway politics will impact our daily lives.

Tom Glaisyer: As a Knight Media Policy Fellow at New America, Tom Glaisyer coordinates the Media Policy Program at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative.  Through tracking media policy initiatives at the federal level, and innovative efforts in local communities across the country, Glaisyer reports on the successes and failures, along with their implications for the recommendations from the Knight Commission's recently published report, "Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age,” which focused on ensuring communities nationwide are better informed. Mr. Glaisyer's research focuses in particular on policies to reform public media, increase independent reporting on issues of public interest, and help citizens access and engage with high-quality information.

Mr. Glaisyer is a Ph.D. candidate from Columbia University's School of Journalism where he has focused on the interplay between media and political processes and institutions.  Before joining New America he acted as a consultant and analyst leveraging online platforms for knowledge management as well as for building and sustaining advocacy networks. Prior to this he worked for more than fourteen years across Europe and the United States where his work centered on information technology implementation and organizational change.  He holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and Economics from the University of Birmingham in England, and has passed the qualifying exams of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

Sascha Meinrath is the Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative and has been described as a "community Internet pioneer" and an "entrepreneurial visionary." He is a well-known expert on community wireless networks, municipal broadband, and telecommunications policy. In 2009 he was named one of Ars Technica's Tech Policy "People to Watch" and is also the 2009 recipient of the Public Knowledge IP3 Award for excellence in public interest advocacy. Sascha is a co-founder of Measurement Lab, a distributed server platform for researchers around the world to deploy Internet measurement tools, advance network research, and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. He also coordinates the Open Source Wireless Coalition, a global partnership of open source wireless integrators, researchers, implementors and companies dedicated to the development of open source, interoperable, low-cost wireless technologies. He is a regular contributor to Government Technology's Digital Communities, the online portal and comprehensive information resource for the public sector. Sascha has worked with Free Press, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), the Acorn Active Media Foundation, the Ethos Group, and the CUWiN Foundation.

Sascha serves on the Leadership Committee of the CompTIA Education Foundation as well as the Advisory Council for the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. He blogs regularly at www.saschameinrath.com.

Amy Puffenberger is the Manager of Outreach for WQED Pittsburgh, working in The WQED Education Department. She received her Master’s degree in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University and her Bachelor’s degree in Film and Video Production from Grand Valley State University. She welcomes your feedback at [email protected].

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. She is also codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies;  coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories and coeditor with Erik Barnouw of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema. She has published over 200 scholarly research articles and essays on film history and historiography, documentary and experimental works, amateur film,  media political economy, and digital culture in Screen, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, and The Moving Image. She has lectured in China, Nigeria, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Turkey, Mexico, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Latvia, France, Wales, Russia, the Netherlands, England,  Germany and the US. She has held endowed chair appointments as the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.